Four Stone Hearth 11

It's a posthole! It's a rubbish pit! It's an elk-trapping pit with the remains of a wooden catch box at the bottom! No -- it's a hearth. A Four Stone Hearth! The eleventh carnival in the series, to be precise. And it's all about humans. As the poet put it,

"Now I'm the king of the swingers
Oh, the jungle VIP
I've reached the top and had to stop
And that's what's botherin' me
I wanna be a man, mancub
And stroll right into town
And be just like the other men
I'm tired of monkeyin' around!"

This is where we all pretend to be human.

MC at Neurophilosophy digs into a racist neurology paper by anthropologist Robert Bennett Bean, published in 1906.

The next Hearth will be kindled on 28 March over at Afarensis. Just remember, he likes tart and yummy banana peels, not the sticky sweet stuff inside. Stay on his good side and he hardly ever flings poo at you. Free social grooming and delousing included.

Chris O'Brien at Northstate Science gave a speedy reply to my questions of this morning.
It seems that any evaluation of whether the US has strong or weak site protection depends upon what standards are actually followed when a site is considered for the National Register of Historic Places. I…

Welcome to the newest installment of the four field anthropology blog carnival Four Stone Hearth. As the carnival enters into a new decade there were many wonderful voices clamoring for attention.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------…

I'm very pleased to have made it back onto the courtesy subscription list of Current Archaeology, which is a popular zine about UK archaeology. Not only does it offer good writing and photography, but it covers an area whose archaeology is actually relevant to what I do. Not too many millennia…

Hey Martin, this is very unfair. It's hard enough for us archaeology bloggers to attract an audience when we write about shellfish or dendrochronology without having to compete with you writing about "naked Scandinavians". Even I clicked on your story first!

Donate

ScienceBlogs is where scientists communicate directly with the public. We are part of Science 2.0, a science education nonprofit operating under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. Please make a tax-deductible donation if you value independent science communication, collaboration, participation, and open access.

You can also shop using Amazon Smile and though you pay nothing more we get a tiny something.

More by this author

As I learned a few hours ago, and as a few other Sb bloggers have already announced, Scienceblogs.com will shut down at the end of this month. I'm going to move Aard and continue my blogging, but I haven't figured out where to move it yet. Suggestions from you, Dear Reader, are most welcome.
It…

Medieval account books were so common in Germany and considered to be so worthless, that into the early 19th century they were used as fuel to heat certain archives.
Got nominated to the municipal council. Not likely to be high on the list, but still, feels good to be considered useful.
I was…

Ben Aaronovitch = Benjamin Aaronson wrote The Rivers of London. I wonder if it's a pen name for my grandpa's grandpa Aaron Benjaminson, who was a farmer in Tanum.
Two students are trying to play verbal chess while digging. The board is in their heads.
"Well, I'm not the world's most physical guy /…

Habilitation, docentur, is a symbolic upgrade to your PhD found in Scandinavia and other countries with a strong element of German academic traditions. You can think of it as a boy-scout badge. It confers no salary, but it opens certain doors including that of supervising doctoral candidates.…

More reads

"In the future, maybe quantum mechanics will teach us something equally chilling about exactly how we exist from moment to moment of what we like to think of as time." -Richard K. Morgan
It’s absolutely true that, in quantum mechanics, there are certain pairs of properties that we simply can’t measure simultaneously. Measure the position of an object really well, and its momentum becomes more…

In case you didn't know, reality is science fiction.
If you doubt me, read the news. Read, for example, this recent article in the New York Times about Carnegie Mellon's "Read the Web" program, in which a computer system called NELL (Never Ending Language Learner) is systematically reading the internet and analyzing sentences for semantic categories and facts, essentially teaching itself…

Blurring, chopping and blocking. Three online items this week all deal with some pretty dynamic phenomena.
The blurring is in our perceptions. It turns out that if you even think you have lost money in an experiment, your ability to distinguish between musical notes will be hampered. What’s the connection? Dr. Rony Paz has been showing that this tendency to lump sounds together is tied to fear.…